Facebook claimed Wednesday to have fixed an embarrassing glitch that saw its founder Mark Zuckerberg’s own private photos leaked onto the Internet.

Hackers highlighted the security flaw in the social networking site by posting 14 of the billionaire’s personal photos on the web.

The glitch let users view recently uploaded photos regardless of security settings. To exploit the bug, people could repeatedly report a user’s public photos as inappropriate until Facebook presented a gallery of other photos from that user to offer a chance to report those as well.

The photos of 27-year-old Zuckerberg included shots of him holding a chicken, making food with his girlfriend and meeting US President Barack Obama.

Directions to exploit the bug had reportedly been circulating on the Internet for two weeks before Facebook addressed it.

“We discovered a bug in one of our reporting flows that allows people to report multiple instances of inappropriate content simultaneously,” Facebook said in a statement.

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“The bug allowed anyone to view a limited number of another user’s most recently uploaded photos irrespective of the privacy settings for these photos,” it said.

“This was the result of one of our recent code pushes and was live for a limited period of time,” Facebook said.

“Upon discovering the bug, we immediately disabled the system, and will only return functionality once we can confirm the bug has been fixed,” it said.

An unidentified Facebook user who exploited the bug posted the pictures of Zuckerberg to the image-sharing website Imgur along with the comment: “It’s time to fix those security flaws Facebook…”

The user claimed they were taken from Zuckerberg’s Facebook page although a number of the pictures have previously been released publicly.

Facebook, which has more than 800 million members, agreed in a deal with the US Federal Trade Commission last week to tighten its privacy policies and submit to external audits in order to settle charges that it abused users’ personal data.

In its statement about the photo bug, Facebook said “the privacy of our user’s data is a top priority for us, and we invest significant resources in protecting our site and the people who use it.”

Zuckerberg personally responded to the hack in a blog post explaining his “commitment to the Facebook community”.

“When I built the first version of Facebook, almost nobody I knew wanted a public page on the internet. That seemed scary. But as long as they could make their page private, they felt safe sharing with their friends online. Control was key”, Zuckerberg wrote.

News of the glitch comes just one week after the 800-million strong social network settled a case with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission looking into deceptive privacy practices. As a result of that settlement, Facebook agreed to submit to independent privacy audits for the next 20 years.